Bhattacharya Uttam, Rahut Amit Kumar and De Sujoy, Cognizant Technology Solutions - Kolkata, India

Today it is crucial for organizations to pay even greater attention on quality management as the importance of this function in achieving ultimate business objectives is increasingly becoming clearer. Importance of the Quality Management (QM) Function in achieving basic need by ensuring compliance with Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) / International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a basic demand from business nowadays. However, QM Function and its processes need to be made much more mature to prevent delivery outages and to achieve business excellence through their review and auditing capability. Many organizations now face challenges in determining the maturity of the QM group along with the service offered by them and the right way to elevate the maturity of the same. The objective of this whitepaper is to propose a new model –the Audit Maturity Model (AMM) which will provide organizations with a measure of their maturity in quality management in the perspective of auditing, along with recommendations for preventing delivery outage, and identifying risk to achieve business excellence. This will enable organizations to assess QM maturity higher than basic hygiene and will also help them to identify gaps and to take corrective actions for achieving higher maturity levels. Hence the objective is to envisage a new auditing model as a part of organisation quality management function which can be a guide for them to achieve higher level of maturity and ultimately help to achieve delivery and business excellence.

Audit; Software Quality Assurance; Risk Management; Engagement Maturity; Business Excellence